Junkyard Treasure: 1967 Dodge A100 Van

It takes a lot to use up an A100, but this one finally reached the end of the road

June 9, 2016

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The Dodge A100 was the most popular of the forward-control Detroit small vans of the 1960s, and it has enjoyed something of a renaissance in popularity in recent years (perhaps due in part to the Dusty Rust-Eze character in Pixar's "Cars" franchise). Still, you'll still see the occasional A100 at a big self-service wrecking yard, because used-up, hard-life examples with no more miles left in them aren't worth restoring. Here's a '67 that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area yard last month.

The Sportsman was very popular as a surfer van in Southern California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and this one shows signs of having served in that role. Photo by Murilee Martin

I own a fairly original '66 A100 Custom Sportsman, and so I'm always looking for a few more bits for it, on the rare occasion that I find one in a place like this. Strangely, though, I have just about everything I need for my van, so I just took the cargo-door lock cylinders, as part of my project to make all my van's doors open with the same key.

Yes, you could fit eight humans and a dog in the A100 Sportsman passenger van, which was marketed as a station wagon. Photo by Chrysler

Chrysler marketed the passenger-seat-equipped Sportsman window van as a station wagon; it could fit the driver and seven passengers (a load that would have immobilized a '67 Volkswagen Transporter), but the A100's bouncy, solid-axle ride was more suitable for a squad of Marshal Zhukov's troops in 1944 than for luxury-seeking American suburbanites.

The 170-cubic-inch Slant-6 engine was standard in the 1967 A100, but the 225-cubic-inch version was an option that year.

Most of these vans came with the indestructible (as long as you don't take it onto a road-race track) Slant-6 engine, either 170 or 225 cubic inches, though customers could get a 273-cubic-inch V8 as well. How many miles were on this van by the time it was discarded at age 49? With the five-digit odometer, there's no way to know … but I'm guessing at it's 365,562 and not the 65,562 indicated.